Jeremy Strong has always been ‘drawn to fallible, vulnerable characters’
The Boston native and Emmy winner stars as a volatile father in ‘Armageddon Time’
Boston native Jeremy Strong is known for playing characters whose insecurity simmers beneath their anger — most famously, Kendall Roy on HBO’s “Succession,” which won him an Emmy in 2020. In the new film “Armageddon Time,” Strong plays Irving Graff, the sometimes explosive, sometimes gentle father of the film’s rambunctious young lead.
Based on writer-director James Gray’s experiences, “Armageddon Time“traces the friendship between two boys, Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) who’s white, and Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), the only Black student in their class. Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins star as Paul’s mother and grandfather in the film, which excavates themes of white privilege, racism, and complicity in 1980s Queens, N.Y. “I think there’s real shame in the subsoil of this movie that everything is growing out of,” Strong says.
The Globe chatted with Strong, 43, about finding the humanity in a complicated character like Graff, his acting method, and the teachers who helped launch his career.
Q. What were your first experiences with acting? Did you do any roles at local theaters?
A. When I was maybe 4 or 5, my mother sent me down the street in Jamaica Plain. There was a church off of Center Street near where we lived that had a theater group in its basement.
I immediately took to it and found freedom in it. It was an experience of levitation and escape. And then it became an obsession, I think like it does for a lot of people.
I moved to Sudbury and when I got to high school at Lincoln-Sudbury, there were two teachers there named Bill and Judy Plott. They kind of were the first people to maybe see something in me that I might have to offer in a serious way.
When I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [in London], they paid for my tuition. They were really important people in my early life.
Q. You’ve said in other interviews that acting is a “pressure valve” for you or a kind of “healing” thing. Do you remember the first role that felt like that for you?
A. I think a lot of actors find that there’s a certain freedom that they experience, and a certain ability to express real things and struggle through on camera or on stage . . . like, Gordian knots. There’s something very cathartic about that.
I’ve always been drawn to fallible, vulnerable characters. I guess maybe in a way it’s because that’s an arena where it’s OK to be fallible and vulnerable, when it’s not really always OK to be that way in our world.
Q. A New Yorker profile of you from last year said that instead of method acting, you practice “identity diffusion.” It quoted you to say that means “clear[ing] away anything — anything — that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene.”
A. Well, first, I’ll say that was entirely a sort of mischaracterization.
Identity diffusion, just conceptually, is about how people are malleable and have permeable boundaries, that the self is malleable. That’s not a method — that’s just like, I find that to be true.
I think identity is pretty plastic, and acting is a sort of exploration of the plasticity of self. You put yourself on airplane mode, and you let yourself be filled up with whatever the material is, and whatever the material demands of you.
You’re always in control; even when you lose control, it’s within the boundaries of your artistry. The whole thing is marrying a level of emotional veracity with craft. It’s not just about, like, unleashing chaos on a set: You do it with precision and control.
Q. You said earlier that you find “freedom” and a “cathartic” power in acting. Do you find that certain characters or certain roles are the most cathartic?
A. I should say, I don’t do this because I’m looking for some kind of personal catharsis; it’s not therapy for me.
What I really want to do is serve a piece of writing, and great writing touches on the extremities of human experience. And so through that you get to participate in those extremities in a way that is not really accessible, at least to me, in my normal life.
‘What I really want to do is serve a piece of writing, and great writing touches on the extremities of human experience.’
JEREMY STRONG
With [Irving Graff ], he’s a boiler repairman whose life is a pressure cooker. And he does blow a gasket and he does lose control, and he is full of rage and angst, but also is tender, kind-hearted, goofy. He’s trying his best. And I think often failing. But to try and inhabit a character like that in all of his toughness and incomprehension and ineptitude, and then find within that person moments of vulnerability and real heart — there’s something very powerful to me about that.
Q. Irving is a character whose choices hurt Johnny Davis deeply. What does it mean to you to show vulnerability and heart in a role like that? Do you ever worry you’re going to excuse him?
A. I don’t feel like I’m trying to do anything in some objective way. I don’t feel separate from or outside of Irving. The only thing you’re trying to do as an actor is, in a visceral way, and in an empathic way, try and see through their eyes, sort of see feelingly.
I’m trying to puzzle through what he’s trying to puzzle through, trying to understand him as best as I can.
The choice, the dilemma that this character is facing, is, I would say, an impossible choice and insoluble problem. And good movies are about insoluble problems that don’t give an easy answer.